Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 42 items for :
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- Sociology of Family x
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Political and public stories about class and food rarely scrutinize how socio-economic and cultural resources enable access to certain foods.
Tracing the symbolic links between everyday eating at home and broader social frameworks, this book examines how classed relations play out in middle-class homes to show why class is relevant to all understandings of food in Great Britain.
The author illuminates how ‘good’ food, and the identities configured through its consumption, is associated with middle-class lifestyles and why this relationship is often unquestioned and thus saliently normalised.
Considering food consumption in a wider social context, the book offers an alternative understanding of class relations, which extends academic, political and public debates about privilege.
What is it like to have a baby in climate crisis?
This book explores the experiences of pregnant women and their partners, pre- and post-birth, during the catastrophic Australian bushfire season of 2019-20 and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic. Engaging a range of concepts, including the Pyrocene, breath, care and embodiment, the authors explore how climate crisis is changing experiences of having children. They also raise questions about how gender and sexuality are shaped by histories of human engagements with fire.
This interdisciplinary analysis brings feminist and queer questions about reproduction and kin into debates on contemporary planetary crises.
Understanding what ‘family’ means – and how best to support families – depends on challenging politicised assumptions that frame ‘ordinary’ families in comparison to an imagined problematic ‘other’.
Learning from the perspectives of people who were in care in childhood, this innovative book helps redefine the concept of family. Linking two longitudinal studies involving young adults in England, it reveals important new insights into the diverse and dynamic complexity of family lives, identities and practices in time – through childhood and beyond.
Paving the way for future policy and practice, this book makes an important contribution to the theorisation of family in the 21st century.
What does mothering mean in different cultures and societies? This book extensively applies biographical and narrative research methods to mothering from international perspectives.
This edited collection engages with changing attitudes and approaches to mothering from women’s individual biographical experiences, illuminating how socially anticipated tasks of mothering shaped through interlinking state, media, religious beliefs and broader society are reflected in their identities and individual life choices. Considering trust, rapport, reflexivity and self-care, this collection advances methodological practice in the study of mothers, carers and childless women’s lives.
This book presents a poignant and sensitive account of the challenges faced by adult children when making difficult decisions about care for and with their ageing parents in later life.
It offers new insights into the practical, emotional and physical effects that witnessing the ageing and death of parents has on those in late midlife and how these relationships are negotiated during this phase of the life course.
The author uses a psychosocial approach to understand the complexity of the experience of having a parent transition to care and the ambiguous feelings that these decisions evoke.
Women and families within the criminal justice system (CJS) are increasingly the focus of research and this book considers the timely issues of intersectionality, violence and gender. With insights from frontline practice and from the lived experiences of women, the collection examines prison experiences in a post-COVID-19 world, domestic violence and the successes and failures of family support.
A companion to the first edited collection, Critical Reflections on Women, Family, Crime and Justice, the book sheds new light on the challenges and experiences of women and families who encounter the CJS.
Accessible to both academics and practitioners and with real-world policy recommendations, this collection demonstrates how positive change can be achieved.
Drawing on interviews with informants from a diverse range of 16 countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Peru, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Nigeria, this book examines how child support systems often fail to transfer payments from separated fathers to mothers and their children. It lays out how these systems are structured in ways that render them ineffective, while positioning women as responsible for their failures.
The book charts the demise of child support as a feminist intervention, resituating it as gendered governance practice that operates by making the system inaccessible, failing to deliver outcomes, and condoning fathers’ irresponsibility. It identifies how the gender order is entrenched through child support failure and offers possibilities for feminist reform.
In 1990, disturbing television footage emerged showing the inhumane conditions in which children in Romanian institutions were living. Viewers were shocked that the babies were silent. The so-called ‘Romanian orphans’ became subjects of several international research studies. In parallel, Romania had to reform its child protection system in order to become a member of the European Union.
This book sheds light on the lived experiences of these children, who had become adults by the time the country joined the EU. Uniquely, the book brings together the accounts of those who stayed in institutions, those who grew up in foster care and those who were adopted, both in Romania and internationally. Their narratives challenge stereotypes about these types of care.
Attachment parenting is an increasingly popular style of childrearing that emphasises ‘natural’ activities such as extended breastfeeding, bedsharing and babywearing. Such parenting activities are framed as the key to addressing a variety of social ills. Parents’ choices are thus made deeply significant with the potential to guarantee the well-being of future societies.
Examining black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting, Hamilton shows the limitations of this neoliberal approach. Unique in its intersectional analysis of contemporary mothering ideologies, this outstanding book fills a gap in the literature on parenting culture studies, drawing on black feminist theorizing to analyse intensive mothering practices and policies.
Black Mothers and Attachment Parenting is shortlisted for the 2021 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.
The relationship between the family and civil society has always been complex, with the family often regarded as separate from, or even oppositional to, civil society.
Taking a fresh empirical approach, Muddiman, Power and Taylor reveal how such separation underestimates the important role the family plays in civil society. Considering the impact of family events, dinner table debates, intergenerational transmission of virtues and the role of the mother, this enlightening book draws on survey data from 1000 young people, a sample of their parents and grandparents, and extended family interviews, to uncover how civil engagement, activism and political participation are inherited and fostered within the home.
